Theater Year Brings Change Of The Guard

Two exits -- one expected but suddenly tragic, the other surprising and oddly romantic -- added real-life drama to the Connecticut theater season that is now winding down.

Arvin Brown announced last season that he would be leaving Long Wharf Theatre, which he headed nearly since its creation, at the end of the 1996-97 season. But his final year was clouded by the illness of his wife, Joyce Ebert, the theater's leading actress throughout all of Brown's tenure. So serious was Ebert's condition that Brown elected to withdraw from what would have been his final production, ``The Joy Luck Club,'' which he had previously staged in China.

During the run of the final show at the Hartford Stage Company, ``The Gershwins' Fascinating Rhythm,'' Mark Lamos announced he was stepping down as artistic director. His hopes of sending the Gershwin revue to Broadway, coupled with the demands of his career as a director of opera, forced him to give up the responsibility of running the theater he had built into Connecticut's most prestigious and successful company.

The changes of the guard will almost certainly be remembered as the highlights of a season that produced few deeply memorable productions.

No new August Wilson, whose career was fostered at Yale Repertory Theatre, emerged. Both Yale and Long Wharf produced vital new works by black playwrights, Keith Glover and John Henry Redwood. But neither truly lit up the skies over New Haven.

Hartford Stage dropped one of the two new shows on its original schedule, Clint Holmes' ``Comfortable Shoes,'' substituting a revival of ``The Colored Museum'' by George C. Wolfe. The other new play, Richard Foreman's ``Pearls for Pigs,'' mystified one and all, and enraged many playgoers.

Long Wharf opened its season with an American premiere of an English import, Patrick Marber's ``Dealer's Choice,'' and closed with a second new American play, ``Voir Dire'' by Joe Sutton. Both proved solid but less than revelatory evenings. In addition to the Glover musical theater piece, Yale Rep premiered a new musical, ``Triumph of Love,'' which unaccountably is headed to Broadway in the fall, and also offered a strange depiction of a 19th-century con artist, ``The Adventures of Amy Bock.''

Each of the big three theaters that run from fall to summer had its hits and misses, but Yale Rep probably wins out over Hartford and Long Wharf for its originality and daring. A rundown of the work of each of the three major institutions will show part of the face of the Connecticut season, fleshed out by glimpses of some of the shows at the Goodspeed Opera House, which runs from spring to winter on a calendar year, and quick looks at Hartford's ambitious TheaterWorks, and of three major presenters, the Bushnell Memorial, the Shubert Performing Arts Center in New Haven and Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford.

Yale Repertory Theatre -- Stan Wojewodski Jr., who has renewed his contract as dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of the Rep, tried out something old, ``The First Lady,'' and something new, ``The Adventures of Amy Bock,'' in a season with a strong feminist bent.

His revival of the rarely done inside-Washington comedy by George S. Kaufman and Katharine Dayton proved highly entertaining and oddly topical. His production of Julie McKee's account of the bizarre peregrinations and scams of New Zealand's real-life Amy Bock, who sometimes disguised herself as a man, proved intriguing but terribly uneven. The same was true of the Broadway-bound ``Triumph of Love,'' the James Magruder-Jeffrey Stock-Susan Birkenhead adaptation of Marivaux, which also featured a heroine in britches, in this case the charming and silver-throated Susan Egan.

Yale also offered a less than urgent revival of David Mamet's ``The Cryptogram,'' with two ``Angels in America'' veterans, Ellen McLaughlin and Stephen Spinella. Liz Diamond's whimsical revival of Thornton Wilder's ``The Skin of Out Teeth,'' with three impressive student leads overshadowed Glover's Faustian folk saga ``Thunder Knocking on the Door'' with blues by Keb' Mo'.

Long Wharf Theatre -- New Haven's first regional theater delivered two impressive new plays, Redwood's ``The Old Settler,'' a touching, finely observed portrait of two sisters in the Harlem Renaissance, and Joe Sutton's ``Voir Dire,'' a dynamic courtroom drama focusing on a mostly white and female jury arguing over a black male school principal accused of buying drugs from an undercover cop.

Race also figured in the play, which gave the season its most vivid and haunting performance as Julie Harris took on the central role in Athol Fugard's ``The Road to Mecca.'' The season opened with an competent American premiere of Marber's ``Dealer's Choice,'' featuring an eccentric performance by Reg Rogers.